Month: February 2018

The original Telegraph language, alleging that proposed Knesset legislation would allow the government to expropriate “church land”, was changed to note that the proposal relates to land sold by the church, and now owned by private (Jewish) investors.

The Guardian error is an important one, because the erroneous claim that Israel is ‘confiscating church land’ lends credibility to an outrageous statement by church leaders – quoted in the report – which outrageously compares the government’s behavior to “laws enacted against the Jews during dark periods in Europe”.

This month, the New Statesman published an article by Sarah Helm entitled “How Donald Trump provoked a Palestinian refugee revolt” which is inaccurate on two levels – it makes false assertions and misleading statements about specific details, and presents a very selective version of the overall story.

Despite the fact that we’ve prompted corrections on this point continually over the years, UK media outlets continue to make errors regarding Israel’s capital – by claiming, explicitly or implicitly, that Tel Aviv is Israel’s capital. We caught two such errors yesterday, one at the Daily Express and the other at the Daily Mail.

If foreign journalists covering the region held Palestinian leaders to the same level of critical scrutiny that they consistently hold Israeli leaders to, the ten seconds of Abbas addressing the UN would cause nothing less than a media storm – with reports, analyses and commentaries informing readers that Abbas’s claim that Palestinians “are committed to fostering a culture of peace and a rejection of violence” is simply the opposite of the truth.

Following communication with UK Media Watch, editors at the Evening Standard revised the headline and text to make it clear that the incident on Israel’s northern border last week was started by an Iranian drone that penetrated Israeli air space.

In initial reports on Sunday and Monday, following hostilities on Saturday between Israel and Syria, the Iranian drone (which violated Israeli air space and caused the incident) wasn’t included in the headline and only appeared further in the article. However, a recent report in the Independent went a step further, omitting the drone altogether in both the headline and the text.

The Guardian simply has no credibility on the issue of anti-Jewish racism, and we seriously doubt that the editor responsible for the piece condemning attacks on Soros was motivated by a genuine anger towards antisemitic expressions. As Guardian journalist Michael White tweeted, on an unrelated controversy, “we all cherry pick our outrage sometimes”.

Guest post by Akus We have become used to the media misreporting events from Israel. However, the reports that followed the recent destruction of an Iranian drone that entered Israeli airspace were […]

A Feb. 11th report in the Independent, by Daniel Khalili-Tari, managed to get a crucial detail wrong, claiming that an Iranian drone was shot down over Syria, despite prior reports at the same publication making it clear that the drone was shot down after it crossed the northern border into Israel.

The decision by The Economist to leave the false impression that a leading Holocaust historian evoked such a comparison does not reflect well on the seriousness of editors in upholding their own editorial standards, which includes a pledge to “consider whether the context and presentation of the facts are fair”.

Foreign journalists covering the region are so careful not to amplify or accept at face value the “hasbara” disseminated by the Israeli government or pro-Israel groups, yet seem perfectly willing to report (as real news) such staged protests and other forms of political street theatre.

We contacted Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer by email, to ask him if, as The Economist claimed, he’s used the term “modern concentration camps”, to characterize the detention of African migrants. Bauer promptly replied to our email and flatly denied ever using any version of the term.

The suggestion in the EU report that the Jewish “narrative” is being promoted “at the expense of other religions” represents the opposite of the truth, as Israel continues to safeguard Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, whilst Palestinian leaders continually deny Jewish history in the holy city and incite their people to view any Jewish presence on Judaism’s holiest site as an intrusion onto an exclusively ‘Muslim’ site.